


The Luckiest Woman in the World

by Edonohana



Category: The Leftovers
Genre: F/M, Magical Realism, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Surrealism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17087141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: Nora Durst in another world.





	The Luckiest Woman in the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



A fetus floats in warm slippery liquid, cocooned in living flesh. Soft darkness. Muffled sounds. No thought, only sensation. It’s pushed out, sliding slick and wet through walls that press too tight to draw a breath. It opens its eyes, naked and cold. The light hurts its eyes. Its first breath outside of its mother is a wail. 

Nora sat in chilled slippery liquid, locked into the machine. Pitch black. Echoing clangs. She exhaled, and waited for death or a new life. The liquid became solid, a tomb. She couldn’t have expanded her lungs if she’d tried. A shattering crack, and she was curled up, naked and cold, under a moon as bright and white as a hospital light. Her first breath in the world of her children was a sob.

Nobody called out for her. No “Mommy, mommy!” No “Where’d _she_ come from?” No “Hey, naked lady, come with us, please.”

Slowly, she stood. The rough asphalt hurt her bare feet. It was the same landscape where she’d climbed into the machine, complete with the broad road, but at night. She wondered if they had drugged and tricked her, dumping her where they’d left her after dismantling the machine. But there were no electric lights anywhere to be seen. No hum of distant cars. No people. The moon and stars shone with a fierce brilliance in the black sky of an empty world.

She walked until the moon set and the sky lightened, past the hulks of wrecked and abandoned cars. A few had skeletons in the back or passenger seats, clothed in rotted rags, but no more than one per vehicle. The only skeleton in the driver’s seat was in a car that had smashed into an empty one.

_I wonder…_

No. She hadn’t come here to wonder. She’d come to _know_. But her wheels turned whether she wanted them to or not, and when she came to the first house, she didn’t wait long after her first knock before she walked in. 

The polished wood was comforting on her sore feet. She limped to the closet. The clothes smelled musty and there was a layer of dust on the shoes, but she was hardly in a position to be fussy. Lucky her, a woman had lived there; even luckier, she was close to Nora’s size. She hesitated between a crisp business suit and a casual dress of the sort you’d wear around young children and not care if anything spilled on it. She probably had a lot of hot dusty walking in her future, so she chose the dress. 

That reminded her that she needed a hat. But the only one she could find was a fedora fit for a 1940s private eye. It would look absurd with her mommy dress, as it was obviously intended for a completely different outfit. But she easily burned in the Australian sun, and it wasn’t as if her biggest worry was someone critiqueing her fashion choices. 

She laced up a pair of sneakers, popped on the fedora, and went back out, walking down what seemed to be the small town’s one main street. Nora Durst, Mommy, P.I. The crunch and slap of her footsteps seemed very loud. Nora’s steps slowed as she approached a daycare. The playground’s swings and slides and jungle gym were sized for children age six and under. 

A woman stepped out of the building and beckoned to her. She was a little younger than Nora, with long brown hair in a braid, and also wore a mommy dress. “G’day!” 

Nora followed her inside. She had to bite her lip hard to stop the prickling in her eyes when she saw the daycare. It was full of colored blocks on soft mats, children’s drawings pinned to the walls: all the detritus of the two-to-six set. It also had a sleeping bag and a lit propane stove with coffee bubbling over it. 

The woman bustled around, pulling up two child-sized chairs at a child-sized table and setting out a second mug. She poured out coffee for them both. “Please. Have a seat.”

Nora sat awkwardly in the tiny chair, but the other woman plopped into hers with ease, even though she was the same size as Nora. Maybe she was the teacher, and was used to sitting in them. She offered Nora her hand. “I’m Nina Dunn.” 

“I’m Nora Durst.”

Nina gave her hand a vigorous shake. “Pleased to meet you, Nora Cursed.”

“Durst,” Nora said. “Nora _Durst_.”

“Right. I got it, mate. Funny name, Cursed—”

“ _Durst._ ”

Nina spoke right over her. “—like you’re unlucky. Guess we’re all that. I ought to call myself Nina Cursed!”

“It’s Durst, not Cursed,” Nora said. “With a D. D-U-R-S-T. And what do you mean, we’re all unlucky? What happened here?”

“Not from around these parts?” Nina asked.

“No.” 

“Seven years ago, I was at my job at the Big W. At the next town over—this one’s too small to have one. I was a register girl.” Nina spotted a stray lego on the table. She picked it up and turned it around in her fingers as she spoke. It was a red one. That had been Erin’s favorite color. Jeremy’s had been green. “I’d just picked up this lady’s box of Weetabix when she disappeared. So did everyone else. Everyone, in the entire store. There must have been fifty people in it, and every one of them was gone. I dropped the box, and it hit the floor with a tremendous crash.”

Nina paused for so long, rotating the red lego, that Nora said, “It was that heavy?”

“No, no. Weetabix is a wheat cereal. Little flat biscuits. I couldn’t understand it. I stood there staring at the box, and finally I picked it up and opened it. There was nothing inside but Weetabix. I even put a biscuit in my mouth to make sure. I almost choked on it when I heard someone shouting outside.”

“Mm-hm,” Nora said, when Nina paused again. The Department of Sudden Departures ran workshops on encouraging sounds to make when interviewees stopped talking.

“It was a woman who’d swerved her car off the road and gone into a ditch. She was hysterical. Her sister had disappeared right out of the passenger seat. That was what had actually made the noise, you see: I dropped the Weetabix at the same moment that all the cars crashed outside. We searched them, but the only person we found was a teenage boy in the backseat. He was dead. Neck broken. The rest of the cars were completely empty with the seatbelts buckled. The people in them had vanished. It happened around the world. 98 percent of the population, just… gone.” 

Nora, shifting uncomfortably in the child’s chair, noticed a green lego on the floor. She picked it up and closed her fist around it, so it would stop distracting her. “Did you lose—who did you lose?”

“Everyone,” Nina said simply. “All my friends. My neighbors. My parents. My brother. My husband. My two children. You?”

“My husband. My children, Jeremy and Erin.”

Nina waited for her to go on, then leaned forward, her eyes hungry. “But…? You still had someone left?”

“My brother,” Nora said. “Some other people I knew. Our parents were already dead.”

Her mind was too full of the knowledge that Erin and Jeremy were alive to pay much thought to what exactly she should tell this woman. Erin and Jeremy were alive. Erin and Jeremy were _alive._ They had to be—they’d disappeared in her kitchen, safe in their father’s care. Or rather, from their point of view, she’d disappeared from their kitchen.

Nina gave a deep sigh, wistful and jealous. “ _People_ you knew—more than one? More than _two_? And a brother! You must be the luckiest woman in the world.”

“I’d thought I was the unluckiest. Where I came from, 2% of the population disappeared,” Nora began. Nina listened with a mixture of skepticism and openness to possibilities that Nora found very familiar. She concluded, “You could track down the scientist who went through, and get him to build another machine. Then you could go to my world, where your children are. Where did they disappear from?”

“Here.” Nina waved her hand in a broad gesture. “This daycare. Everyone vanished. The teacher too.”

“Well, then they’re fine. They weren’t in a car, they had a caretaker, and they still have their dad and each other. Let me tell you the name of the scientist. He’s—”

“But I’m the only person here,” Nina interrupted. “Everyone else left. They made a settlement in the town that had the Big W. There was more there. More supplies. More people. It was just easier. So if I leave to find this scientist, and my children come back, they’ll be alone. There’s no one for miles. When they disappeared, Eric was four and Jenny was two. Now Eric would be eleven and Jenny would be nine. That’s still so young. I can’t leave them alone at that age!”

“Is that why you’re living here? You’re waiting for your children to come back?”

Nina nodded, looking faintly surprised that Nora hadn’t already figured that out. “Of course. They disappeared from here, so it stands to reason that this is where they’d return to.”

“But it’s been seven years…” Nora broke off. It had been seven years for her too, and she hadn’t given up. She’d find the scientist herself, and send a message to Nina when she did. “Just one question before I go, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“To your knowledge, did your children have any food allergies?”

“No. I do, though. Wheat. I was terribly sick the night after I swallowed that bit of Weetabix.” Nina gave a thoughtful frown. “Funny you should ask that. Everyone I’ve met after the Disappearance is sensitive to wheat. It’s become a gluten-free world.”

Nina gave Nora directions to the settlement, and Nora set off down the road, trying to figure out how the Department of Sudden Departures could have missed such a simple and obvious explanation. How could _she_ have missed it? She’d asked the food allergy question a thousand times, and only a small minority of the interviewees had mentioned a wheat sensitivity. Then again, she’d had no idea that her husband and children had it. Probably in most cases the symptoms were more subtle than Nina’s, manifesting as a mild feeling of unwellness or even a bad mood, possibly as much as days after the wheat consumption. Just like Nora, the interviewees had never known such a crucial but easily overlooked fact about their loved ones. 

The road wound into stark hills, and the sun shone down fiercely. Good thing she’d taken the fedora.

“Nora! Hey! Nora!” 

She knew that voice as well as her own. Stunned, Nora turned and saw her brother trotting down the slope of a hill.

“Matt! What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

“Same way you did.”

“But you’re sick.”

“All the more reason.” A familiar intense gleam lit up his eyes. “I have something important to do, and I don’t have much time. I got a message from God, Nora. He wants the sacrifice of an only-begotten child.”

“What?” At first Nora was only baffled, then a terrible thought occurred to her. “Not your son!”

“No, no!” Matt gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “It just has to be _an_ only-begotten child. It doesn’t matter whose. Don’t worry, Nora. You have two, so He doesn’t want yours.”

“But…”

“Hang on.” Matt held up a hand, then ducked behind a boulder. He returned holding two children by the hand. “Do you mind watching these kids for me? I have to get to the sacrifice.”

Bewildered, Nora took the children’s offered hands. They were a girl of about nine, and a boy of about eleven. They looked up at her with solemn trust as Matt hurried back up the hill. 

“Hi,” Nora said, for lack of any better ideas. “My name is Nora. What’s yours?”

“I’m Jenny,” said the girl.

“I’m Eric,” said the boy. 

_No way,_ Nora thought. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Nina Dunn,” said Jenny. “Do you have any snacks? Mommy always gives us snacks when we’re on a walk.”

“Nothing with wheat,” said Eric. “It makes us cranky.”

Nora couldn’t believe Matt would harm a child, but he’d done some strange things when he thought God was involved, and he’d said he intended to make a sacrifice. If she returned Nina’s children, it would be hours before she could get back to Matt. But she couldn’t send such young children to find their way alone while she pursued her brother.

“We’ll have snacks later,” she promised them. “Gluten-free. But first, we’re walking a bit more. There’s a great view from the top of that hill.”

The hill was higher than she’d realized before they started to climb. It was really more of a mountain. When they at last reached the top, they found Matt standing over a stone altar, holding a huge sharp knife in both hands. Atop the altar lay Kevin, naked on his back with his arms flung wide. His skin was glistening wet, like he’d just stepped out of a bath, and his tattoos stood out in sharp detail.

“Kevin!” Nora shouted. “Matt! What are you doing? Stop!”

“He’s an only-begotten child,” Matt said, as if that was a reasonable explanation. “We have to follow God’s commands, even if they’re inexplicable and horrifying.”

“ _I_ didn’t come for God,” Kevin said. “That’s Matt’s thing. I came for you, Nora.”

She marched to the altar and grabbed his arm. It was slick with sweat, and her hand slid off. “Get up, Kevin. If you came for me, then come with me.”

“No, no!” Matt protested. “We came all this way for the sacrifice.”

“Well, I’m not going to just stand here and let you kill him!”

“What?” Matt stared at her, then gave a startled laugh. “Is that what you thought we were doing? You seriously believed I’d kill Kevin?”

Nora felt like an idiot. How could she have jumped to such an awful conclusion about her own brother? “Well, you did say you were making a sacrifice, and he’s naked on a altar, and you’re holding a knife…”

“Yes, I can see how it looks. But that’s not what we’re doing.” Reassuringly, Matt said, “I’m just here to officiate while Kevin kills _himself._ ”

“It’s fine, Nora,” Kevin put in. “I’m used to it.”

“Didn’t you say you came for me?” Nora demanded. “Suicide is your thing. I don’t want anything to do with it! How the hell am I involved in any of this?”

“I’m giving you my heart,” said Kevin. “The knife is just to cut it out.”

Matt cleared his throat. “Let us begin. Bring out the relics. Erin? Jeremy?”

The children stepped up solemnly and held out their open hands. A red lego was cupped in Erin’s soft palm, and a green one in Jeremy’s. Matt took them and raised them high. Kevin closed his eyes, and Matt placed them over his eyelids. 

That was the last straw. Nora was absolutely not going to let her own children get involved in this grotesque ritual. No good mother would allow anything of the kind. She knocked the legos to the ground, shouting, “Erin, Jeremy, you’re both getting a time-out the instant we get down from this mountaintop!”

“Nora,” Kevin said, opening his eyes. “Who are you yelling at?”

“My kids,” she said guiltily. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I just got so—”

“Kids?” Kevin interrupted. “Those aren’t kids. Those are dingos, Nora. The wild dogs of Australia.”

She looked back to the children. They were indeed dingos. She couldn’t understand how she’d failed to notice that before. Under her baffled gaze, the two dingos slunk off into the bush.

Nora wrapped her arms around Kevin’s chest and clasped her hands behind his back. He was a heavy, slippery weight, but she dragged him off the altar. 

Once he was off, he stood up on his own. His sharply defined muscles gleamed in the bright Australian sunlight. “Sorry, Matt. She’s not having it.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Matt replied. “God just wanted to see if I’d really go through with it. He doesn’t need an only-begotten child after all. Instead, he’s provided a pair of dingos for the sacrifice.” 

“Dingos are dogs,” Kevin pointed out. “They can’t hold a knife.”

Matt looked crestfallen. 

“Let’s just go to Mapleton,” Nora said. “All of us. But first, we have to find the scientist who came through before me and get him to build another machine at the daycare. Nina won’t leave it in case they come back.”

“Well, Nora, if she wouldn’t leave the daycare in the hope that they’d come back, she’s not going to leave it to step into the world’s most terrifying machine.” Matt spoke to her like her brother, not like a mad prophet. 

Once he’d put it so plainly, she couldn’t deny the truth. Nina could never be reunited with her children because her own longing for them had trapped her where she was. She would wait forever with the relics of the last moment she’d seen them rather than seeking out the living people that they were now.

“You’re right,” Nora said. “Nina’s not going anywhere. We’ll have to leave her behind.”

“Straight on to Mapleton, then?” Matt asked.

“Mapleton?” She took Kevin’s hand. His fingers closed over hers, warm and strong and dry. This hold wouldn’t slip again. “No. We’re going home.”

“It’s a long way,” Matt said. “A very long way.”

Kevin shook his head. “You’re thinking of your own journey. Ours is easier.”

He led Nora to the cliff. Just like she’d promised without actually knowing, the view was beautiful. And it was a very long way down. 

“Now we jump,” he said.

“But—”

He took a pair of police handcuffs out of his pocket, locked one around her wrist and one around his, then tossed the key over the cliff. It cast bright flashes of reflected sun across the cliffside as it fell sparkling through the air. “If I fall, you fall. Do you think I’d ever risk your life?”

Nora shook her head. His own, sure, but not hers. 

“Then jump.”

She clasped Kevin’s hand. Together, they threw themselves over the edge. Nora was immediately caught by a painless tug at her back. She hovered, her wings beating strongly, catching the hot updrafts. Kevin had wings too, just like hers, white as a dove’s.

Nora flew upward, glorying in the wind on her face. The sky was so vast above, the world so small below. It was all a matter of perspective. If she only flew high enough, she would understand everything.

 

Nora opened her eyes with a gasp. The first thing she saw was Kevin’s lined face, his graying hair, his sweet smile that had never changed in all those years. He was holding her hand.

Her head ached. There was a story about wings of wax that melted when you flew too close to the sun. “Did I fall?” 

“No. You flew.” Then he guided her hand to her head, where she felt the tape and gauze of a bandage. “I mean, yes, that’s how you got hurt. You had a bicycle accident.” 

She remembered it then. “A dingo ran into the road. I swerved to avoid it, and my front wheel hit a rock. I went right over the handlebars.”

“You were in the hospital for a few days. You didn’t wake up. The doctors were starting to talk about transferring you to another facility for long-term care. I took you home instead. I was afraid that if I tried to go after you while you were still in the hospital, some nurse would walk in on us and stop me.”

“Go after me? How?” Wincing, she tried to sit up. He supported her and settled her back against his chest. She leaned against him, turning her face into his warmth. Then she saw the torn plastic bag on the floor. “Kevin, you can’t do that any more—your heart—”

“Nora,” Kevin said, cupping her cheek. “ _You’re_ my heart.”


End file.
